A minute later Charlie arrived in a car suitable to his grandeur.
"Look here, dad," said Charlie in a hurry. "If you're game for a day out I particularly want to show you something. And incidentally you'll see some driving, believe me!"
"My will is made! I am game," answered Mr. Prohack, delighted at the prospect of any diversion, however perilous.
II
When Charlie drew up at the Royal Pier, Southampton (having reached there in rather less time than the train journey and a taxi at each end would have required), he silently handed over the wheel to the chauffeur, and led his mystified but unenquiring father down the steps on the west side of the pier. A man in a blue suit with a peaked cap and a white cover on the cap was standing at the foot of the steps, just above the water and above a motor-launch containing two other men in blue jerseys with the name "Northwind" on their breasts and on their foreheads. A blue ensign was flying at the stem of the launch.
"How d'ye do, Snow?" Charlie greeted the first man, who raised his cap.
Father and son got into the launch and the man after them: the launch began to snort, and off it went at a racing speed from the pier towards midchannel. Mr. Prohack, who said not a word, perceived a string of vessels of various sizes which he judged to be private yachts, though he had no experience whatever of yachts. Some of them flew bunting and some of them didn't; but they all without exception appeared, as Mr. Prohack would have expected, to be the very symbols of complicated elegance and luxury, shining and glittering buoyantly there on the brilliant blue water under the summer sun. The launch was rushing headlong through its own white surge towards the largest of these majestic toys. As it approached the string Mr. Prohack saw that all the yachts were much larger than he imagined, and that the largest was enormous. The launch flicked itself round the stern of that yacht, upon which Mr. Prohack read the word "Northwind" in gold, and halted bobbing at a staircase whose rails were white ropes, slung against a dark blue wall; the wall was the side of the yacht. Mr. Prohack climbed out of the bobbing launch, and the staircase had the solidity under his feet of masonry on earth. High up, glancing over the wall, was a capped face.
"How d'ye do, skipper," called Charlie, and when he had got his parent on to the deck, he said: "Skipper, this is my father. Dad—Captain Crowley."
Mr. Prohack shook hands with a short, stoutish nervous man with an honest, grim, marine face.
"Everything all right?"